In this chapter, I seek to reconstruct the lineaments of a theory of sedimentation in Lefebvre’s The Production of Space. Hardly a dominant feature of the work, Lefebvre’s references to sedimentation are relatively brief, fragmented and – as he often says of Marx’s own account of primitive accumulation and the state – incomplete. My contention, however, is that the problem of sediments offers a productive site for reevaluating Lefebvre’s Marxist project in our own moment of global crisis, particularly his conceptualisation (...) of space as a concrete abstraction. Challenging more urban-focused readings of his oeuvre, Lefebvre’s account of sedimentation foregrounds the enduring role of precapitalist, rural and ‘regressive’ social forms within the continued reproduction of the capitalist relations of production. (shrink)

This essay reviews Banu Bargu’s Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal (2024), focusing on the role of phenomenology in the book’s articulation of global critical theory. I argue that Disembodiment offers a vital contribution to recent efforts to reclaim phenomenology as a radical form of critique. In my brief reflection, I consider the book’s engagement with the phenomenological problem of lived experience, its critical readings of the work of Helmuth Plessner and Frantz Fanon, and its attempt to locate the somatic (...) history of suffering at the heart of the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory, especially as expressed in Theodor W. Adorno’s negative dialectics. At the end of the essay, I sketch three directions for further inquiry opened up by Disembodiment, those pertaining to the questions of space, political consciousness, and teleology. (shrink)

This paper argues that the concept of residue is integral to Henri Lefebvre’s Marxist project and its attempts to redefine class struggle on the worldwide level of uneven development. After examining Lefebvre’s analysis of the spatiotemporal obstruction of everyday life in capitalist society, the paper’s second section considers the residual dimensions of his concept of the proletarian condition, surveying its affinities and divergences with Georg Lukács’s theory of class consciousness. In the third section, I reconstruct Lefebvre’s account of historical sedimentation (...) and explore its implications for understanding class struggle amid the survival of precapitalist social forms. The final section investigates Lefebvre’s method of residues, which he situates at the heart of his metaphilosophy and its commitment to revolutionary possibility on a planetary scale. (shrink)

The last 20 years have witnessed a deepening of the imbrication between capital and the university. This paper seeks to map one point at which this binding occurs: in critical theory. Recently scholars in strategic management have turned to processual and relational ontologies in an attempt to reimagine the logics of profit, value, and growth. These same ontologies have appealed to critical geographers as a means of reconceiving space as unfixed. Drawing on a case study of Deleuze’s appropriation in management (...) literature, I show how such ontologies presuppose a vitalism that necessarily reproduces and obscures the structures of exploitation. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the geographies of electronic waste (e-waste). Several studies have examined how e-waste is increasingly exported to processing sites in China, India, Pakistan, Ghana and elsewhere across the global south, where it leads to devastating health effects. Through an interdisciplinary patchwork of human geography, public health, narrative theory, and philosophies of memory, this paper seeks to show how the export of e-waste to the global south—and the toxins it brings along with (...) it—is part of what makes “resilient” urban growth and citizenship possible elsewhere, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area. The surplus value of technological production is only recuperable, in places like Silicon Valley, if its toxicity is spatially and temporally displaced onto— and hidden within— surplus bodies who are cast into necropolitical terrains of ill- health and danger. Tracing this story of e-waste, which spans from the epigenetic to the geopolitical, from the San Francisco Bay Area to China’s Greater Bay Area, requires a method of empirical allegory that can detect global iniquities on the most granular of scales, and vice versa. (shrink)